Janet Smith
Pianistically, Paul Hanmer is beautiful. His music – folkloric, occasionally proletarian, always warm and real – is not a private dominion or a place where culture is combat. His music, as experienced on his celebrated Sheer Sound debut album Trains to Taung, has reached into the South African jazz community like a hand around the heart.
Hanmer is a frontrunner for best newcomer and best contemporary jazz performance in this year’s FNBSouth African Music Awards – but he is cool in the face of such honours. He’s no Woody Allen who won’t turn up at the ceremony. He likes the idea of going, thrashing it back as a reunion of musicians he likes and a few he honestly respects.
Winning? Well, he hasn’t considered the possibility or the consequences, only the thought of roaming the parking lot to gaze upon the glittering rewards of being an industry player.
Besides, Hanmer is weeks away from finishing his second album. As yet untitled, it will unravel seven pieces, which reflect a reverence both for his own instrument and its history and that of the other musicians and their intimacy with their instruments. McCoy Mrubata, an extraordinary friend and musical partner, is on flute and soprano sax. Barry van Zyl is on percussion. Kendall Reid plays cello, and Costa Nikolau and promising young talent Jonathan Crossley are on acoustic guitar. Jethro Shasha (who played drums on most of Trains to Taung) is on percussion. And there’s a string quartet led by Ricardo Colima.
Cecil Mitchell’s voice is, clearly, the jewel of the piece. (After Cecil and Alarice Marry, a piece Hanmer wrote in tribute to his friend Mitchell and his wife in 1988 and which he’s including on this album, is a tender, uncluttered piece of love.) And there’s little doubt that Mitchell’s appearance on Hanmer’s new album will be something of a reintroduction for those who already know and have missed Mitchell’s voice since he left Johannesburg.
Meanwhile, Hanmer is profoundly touched by Mitchell’s request for him to produce an album later this year. It colours the part of the pianist and engaging live performer that is presumably destined to teach – it marks a space he would still like to occupy in his musical career.
The new album is not haunted by the supreme beauty of Trains to Taung. Hanmer insists it is not a follow-up (“that will come later”). Rather, it’s another gathering of musicians for whom he has deep affection – and in a way, it’s also a means of revisiting significant trips into classic composition, which is his training and one of his great loves.
Hanmer has dreamed of a place where he could play the piano and compose since he was a child, growing up on the Cape Flats. He says he mostly longed simply to have more time for his friends. Now he has more than 50 pieces of music registered with the South African Musicians’ Rights Organisation, most of them never recorded, some recorded with the Unofficial Language project and some later incorporated on Trains to Taung.
It’s a destination Hanmer says he never truly envisaged, but now he’s wrapped inside a circle of friends who are also musicians, and whose marrow is his musical and emotional match.
The forthcoming album will draw on distinctive shapes and structures of melodies and harmonies and will be less improvisatory than Trains to Taung, which was luminous with conversation between the musicians. Sheets on his table, piled neatly into place as far away as possible from the paper he’s hunted down for the taxman, are lavishly decorated with musical notes like curlicued pictures in his mind.
“Denzil Weale has always advocated notating our music,” he says, reflecting on Weale’s ability to gauge the pulse of the music industry. “We need to write down the music of Africa, the music of the country. In a context where most people felt it was enough to be able to either play music or to read and write it, that was quite a radical point of view. It was unfashionable.
“I’ve come to a point where I am less concerned with all the bullshit surrounding what is fashionable. I believe, for instance, that we have to invest in our folk music. The problem is that people hear the word and immediately think of fucking in the mud with a joint in one hand. I’m talking about our traditions of music.
“It’s not really about being the author of new ideas or being a heretic. I’m now, with this second album, trying to find out whether the same voice – my voice – can express itself in a medium which combines instruments played in a certain tradition and which can also make something new out of what we already know. I’m still dreaming.”